Good customer service is super important for any company striving for customer support greatness, but it shouldn’t be all there is to it.Sometimes, the best solution allows your customers to help themselves by giving them access to immediate knowledge without requiring personal assistance.

Solving Customer Queries

A <a href="https://www.groovehq.com/knowledge-base">knowledge base</a>(KB) consists of an online library filled with guides, tutorials, and answers to common customer questions about a business’s products or services. It’s a self-service portal that can be easily accessed by customers and internal employees alike. An effective knowledge base allows you to stay two steps ahead of your customers’ issues. Waiting for customers to come to you is a dangerous strategy.

Knowledge Base

An overwhelming <a href="https://www.groovehq.com/customer-service-statistics#statistics7">91%</a> of customers said they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs. Beyond that, <a href="https://www.groovehq.com/customer-service-statistics#statistics7">55%</a> of consumers fall in love with a brand when that brand offers “easy access to information and support.” Reduce customer effort and you’ll improve customer loyalty.

The Stats Are In Favour

How many steps does the customer have to take to contact you and get answers to their questions? Something that could have taken 10 seconds has now turned into 10 minutes of their time and yours. Why would you not make that process easier?Your customers will be empowered to find their own solutions, feel accomplished, and appreciate your effort to make things as easy as possible.

Reduce The Steps

A good knowledge base will also give a boost to your customer support agents by:<ul><li>Helping them be more productive: Shifting basic support queries over to the knowledge base frees up your support staff for the really important issues.</li><li>Making them happier: Employees are happier when they’re able to spend more time on meaningful interactions. (For example, preempting a problem rather than resolving it after it has already negatively affected the customer.)</li></ul>

Benefits Of A Knowledge Base(KB)

Your knowledge base tool must do more than just exist. It has to be good. The first thing to note is that a knowledge base is, at its core, documentation.Documentation is the media—text, images, and video—that explain a product or service, the material that provides official information.

The Building Block Of Knowledge Base: Documentation

<ul><li>Be easily accessible</li><li>Be organized and easy to navigate</li><li>Solve common problems</li><li>Save a customer time</li><li>Be up to date</li></ul>

Traits Of A Good Knowledge Base

<ul><li>Decide on the core elements of your knowledge base</li><li>Choose your knowledge base content</li><li>Agree on the structure of your knowledge base articles </li><li>Write your knowledge base articles</li><li>Add visuals to your content</li><li>Publish your knowledge base</li><li>Analyze and improve your articles </li></ul>

Basic Process Of Building A Knowledge Base

<ol><li>Having a FAQ section: If a customer has a basic question about your product or service, the first place they generally look is the FAQ section.</li><li>Ensuring that the contact support option is always available.</li><li>Search function: Just like Google’s search bar, you’ll usually see this before the full list of knowledge base articles.</li></ol>

Three Core Elements of a Knowledge Base

Being with these two topics, no time-consuming customer or behaviour research is needed.<ul><li>Basics: Every single question a complete stranger would have about your company or service.</li><li>Getting started: The basic onboarding and setup process a customer goes through when starting to use your service/product, broken down into steps.</li></ul>

Choosing Your Content

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when it comes to knowledge bases specifically.First, focus on scaling the structure of your help content. Create a simple knowledge base template to use for every article.Second, prioritize the customer’s workflow and use cases. Most of your knowledge base articles probably include a set process the user needs to follow. Make it as smooth as possible.

KB Structure

<ul><li>Problem or topic: Describe the task on hand or the customer issue.</li><li>Step by step process: Describe the process of completing the task or solving the issue in detailed, but simple, steps.</li><li>Result: What should happen after the steps have been completed by the customer?</li><li>Related resources: Similar articles, questions, or topics</li></ul>

Article Structure

<ul><li>Put the most important information first. If there’s something the user absolutely needs to know before they get into the process of taking action.</li><li>Chronological order. Make sure the order of each step makes sense and doesn’t interfere chronologically with any other steps.</li><li>If there’s no chronological order or dependencies between tasks, make the easiest ones the first ones. </li><li>Avoid distractions. Structure the instructions in a way that keeps them focused on the tasks on hand and won’t interrupt their workflow.</li></ul>

Structure Tips

<ul><li>When writing the actual text for your articles, mind your language first and foremost to make your knowledge base as effective as possible. Assume the reader is a complete beginner.</li><li>Don’t use any advanced terminologies or industry-related jargon, even if it makes sense to you. This might be the first time the reader has seen any of this information. Make it simple.</li><li>When it comes to actually formatting your text, simplicity is key. Focus on making your communication as scannable as possible.</li></ul>

Writing The Actual Content

The less text, the better: Customer support isn’t the place to practice your novel writing skills. Short paragraphs: Nobody has the time or attention span to pick out important information from a wall of text.Bullet points and lists: You’ll make everyone’s life easier by structuring information in a way that’s easy to read and follow.Bold and italics: Use them to give more dimension to your text. Do not underline words unless they contain a link.Adding links: Point out resources that go more in-depth so you don’t have to explain everything in one article.

Important Points To Consider While Doing KB Content Writing

Visual materials enrich your support content and keep users engaged.The most obvious type of visuals to use in your knowledge base are screenshots of new products to show how things work. But you can also play around with instructional videos, GIFs, or whatever else you feel would add a little something extra to your content.

Add Visuals

Make your knowledge base easy to find both on your own website and through popular search engines. Feel free to link to your knowledge base from other forms of support, too. Don’t be afraid to rub the fact that you have a knowledge base into people’s faces. How else are your customers going to find it? The more places you feature your knowledge base link, the better.

Publish Your Knowledge Base

The success of your knowledge base (or lack of success) should be constantly measured to see where to improve.When looking at your knowledge base performance, focus on impact. Examples of what to track include:<ul><li>Increase in customer satisfaction </li><li>Decreased volume of tickets</li></ul>Examine how your customers are using your company’s knowledge base. What parts are customers engaging with most? What are they searching for?

Analyse and Improve Your KB Content

A good knowledge base is never complete. Don’t be that company with an outdated, useless portal. Audit the entire base on a recurring basis, aim for monthly or quarterly check-ins. Add new products, updates or other changes to your knowledge base articles, and delete old, irrelevant posts about features that don’t exist anymore.

Review Your KB

<ul><li>A good knowledge base will save you tons of time, and make both your customers and support agents happier. It takes time up front, but it’s worth it.</li><li>Gather your customer support team and start simple. Figure out the basics, then get writing.</li><li>Once you have a functioning and effective knowledge base, you can build and improve on it anytime.</li></ul>

Save Time, Money and Resources

Here's the basic process of building a knowledge base: Decide on the core elements of your knowledge base. Select which topics to include. Agree on the structure of the content. Write the knowledge base articles. Add visuals. Analyze and improve.

Stashed ideas

How to Create a Knowledge Base: Building Self-Service for Customer Support | Groove Blog

They do get mixed up a lot. But there is a very important distinction.
<ul>
<li>Customer service is part of the broader customer experience. Customer experience means all of the interactions a customer has with a brand and how they feel about those interactions (the people you interact with, their advertising, the packaging, the physical location, the ambiance, the decor, etc.)</li>
<li>Customer service is the assistance a company provides to help a customer with its products or services. That’s a very specific part of customer experience, often the most important or most memorable part.</li>
</ul>

Customer experience vs customer service

The whole concept of an experience guarantee is based on the idea that your customer is trying to solve a problem, and that’s the insight you need to have to create a wonderful experience and experience guarantee. The way you do this is by listening to your customers. And while that seems simplistic, companies are not as good at listening as they’d like to believe.

The problems customers are trying to solve

To create an experience that allows you to win customers and retain them:<ol><li>Make a guarantee, promise to solve the problem. This could be a customer service provider saying. “I’m going to take care of this for you.”</li><li>Keep the promise: Making a promise in your marketing or advertising is not enough. You have to now act to make sure that promise is kept.</li><li>There will always be a time when you’re unable to keep your promises, or at least in your customer’s mind, you did not keep your promise. You have to find a way to restore trust so that your customer is willing to give you another chance.</li></ol>

Solving the problems customers have

“When you promise to solve a particular problem, you’re also saying, in effect, ‘If your problem falls outside of this, we might not be the best choice for you'”

“When companies try to be all things to all people, they end up not being very good”

Once you identify that problem and you make a particular promise, then you can focus on your customer experience. Whether it’s your marketing, operations, delivery, customer support, you name it, your focus can be on keeping that promise. That’s an important aspect because it gives you that focus. Having an experience guarantee allows you to be a lot more focused and make smarter decisions.

Laser-like focus

Guaranteeing a great experience for your customers isn’t hard, but are you actually delivering on that promise? Jeff Toister, author of The Guaranteed Customer Experience, joins us to talk about the key to earning (and keeping) our customers’ trust and business.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jeff Toister on a guaranteed customer experience

Almost every single company claim to provide great customer service, however, we still hear complaints from customers so we will presume that there is an opportunity for improvement.In order to have a thriving customer support team you must define what "great service" is for your company. Afterwards, once you've set a standard you then only need to deliver on your company values, consistently exceed customer expectations, and examine any legal requirements.

Defining Great Customer Service

It's tempting to say that your company will be available on every channel for your customers however, this isn't applicable for small teams without having to spread your team too thin and deliver inconsistent customer support quality.In order to figure out which channels to support you need to find out what channels your customers are using the most (tech support/live chat/social media), start with focusing on fewer channels, and then capitalize on your existing skill sets.

Choosing which channels to support

So that you may be able to provide high quality, reliable customer support, you must have a great customer support team, but how do you filter out the ones that you need? Here are some questions that can help you better choose candidates:<ul><li>What is the ideal support personality you're looking for?</li><li>What skills should your support professional have? </li><li>How will you integrate this new hire to the team? and;</li><li>How do you keep them?</li></ul>

Hiring the right people

Customer service softwares produce detailed results for us, but it doesn't tell you which metrics matter to your team and what you need to do about them. In order to choose which metrics matter here are three big questions that will help you decide:<ul><li>Why are you reporting?</li><li>Who are you reporting to?</li><li>What do you want the outcome to be?</li></ul>The metrics you choose to report should be meaningful and authentic. Afterwards, take a baseline measurement, set internal targets for your team, and work forward.

Measure the right data

<ul><li>Selecting customer service software: You need to know the difference between "nice to have" features versus necessary features along with the apps that you need to integrate. Having slow or unhelpful tools will waste your support's time.</li><li>Internal Systems: Customer support teams are heavily reliant  on internal systems such as custom database searches, configuration pages, and logging systems to access customers' fix issues. If you can't afford attractive software, make sure that it's not painful to use.</li><li>Set aside a budget for individual tools for your support team, it'll be worth the investment.</li></ul>

Picking your tools

The only downside to having a knowledge base is that it's time consuming to develop, but here are the benefits of having it:<ul><li>It will lessen the strain on your support team</li><li>Allow for faster onboarding </li><li>Greater consistency of support; and</li><li>Saves time for both support and customer</li></ul>

Creating a knowledge base

It's highly recommended to have a customer-focused company, but what should the goal be? The goal is to build in systems across teams that support great service.Support managers are encourages to:<ol><li>Push decision-making to the front line</li><li>Automate customer-friendly processes</li><li>Create feedback loops; and</li><li>Making the team feel respected day in, day out.</li></ol>

Integrating support into your product and company

Follow these 7 foundational steps to build a brand new support department or maximize the success of your existing customer support team.

How to Build a Thriving Support Team and Department - Help Scout

68% of individuals said they would prefer watching a video than contacting a company’s support service to solve a problem with a product. Whatever product or service you offer, your customers will be more satisfied if you provide a video to help them fix their problem as fast as possible. 
To them, a video is more likely to offer digestible information that is easier to follow. Your customers can directly practice what they have seen in the video. It is way more flexible than waiting for your support service team to explain the solution through a call or email.

A Customer Service Video Tutorial

We can’t ignore that living in a fast-paced world has changed customers’ habits. Waiting for a long queue to talk or have a live chat with a customer service agent is outdated and frustrates people. Nowadays, people want every brand to respond to their queries instantly and effectively.
A video can perfectly address the issue through a step-by-step procedure with total clarity, rather than let your agent type a lengthy explanation that will make your customer more confused and leave room for ambiguity and interpretation.

Benefits Of Customer Service Video Tutorials

According to a study, around 82% of customers can’t stand a business that does not offer a quick and immediate resolution. They have left a brand because of poor customer service experiences. 
There is no other option than a customer service video to meet people’s expectations of getting a fast and responsive solution to fix their issues. A video will satisfy them because the solution is instantaneous. They will feel that you do care about their problem and listen to their complaint. This is a significant step to building a healthy and long-lasting relationship with your customers.

Reducing Drop Off Rate

A customer service video allows people to self-serve and find a better way to solve their problems. It makes them happy and they will give a good rate for your organization.
Once the customer satisfaction rate increases, your company will gain some benefits, such as: 
<ul>
<li>89% of individuals tend to make another purchase from the same brand after experiencing positive customer service. </li>
<li>It helps to enhance customer retention by 5%.</li>
<li>When businesses prioritize excellent customer experiences, they can generate sales between 4% and 8% higher than their market.</li>
</ul>

Increase Customer Satisfaction Rate

You can use a customer service video instead of investing a lot of money to hire more support staff. It can be a long-term investment since the queries or issues that arise from time to time may be identical. 
You can post the video on your FAQ page so people can easily access it 24/7 or have your support team provide the URL to everyone who contacts them. It will be more efficient than typing thousands of words or discussing it over the phone.

Lower Hiring Costs

You can achieve more than just making your existing consumers stay longer. A customer service video increases your chances of gaining new customers. 
When they have an excellent customer service experience, 38% of consumers want to tell their friends about it. Unsatisfied consumers, on the contrary, will speak to 9-15 people about their bad experiences.
It implies you’re likely to lose at least nine potential consumers if you can’t afford the best customer service experience.

Gaining New Customers

Important article on customer service and retention

Being able to leverage both automated and human support has led to some incredible advancements, allowing companies to scale their support and deliver personalized experiences more efficiently than ever before.As a result, human support is more critical than ever. And with a greater impact on your customer satisfaction – and ultimately your company’s bottom line – it’s increasingly important to invest in your human support team as a real strategic lever in your business.

Invest in your human support team

The three layers of the Conversational Support Funnel consists of three layers:<ul><li>Proactive support enables you to get ahead of known problems before customers even reach out for help.</li><li>Self-serve support allows users to resolve simple queries on their own, ensuring fast, efficient answers while minimizing the number of repetitive questions hitting your team inbox.</li><li>Finally, there’s human support, which is crucial for those tricky issues that can only be solved by a real-life person. These are the technical or sensitive queries that need a specialized, empathetic response.</li></ul>

The business benefits of human support

Human support is crucial for those tricky or sensitive issues that just can’t be solved with automation or bots, such as payment problems, difficult technical issues, or complex queries that need deeper context. Being able to route these problems to a real person is essential for maintaining customer happiness.What’s more, these are also great opportunities to enhance loyalty and advocacy by building real long-term customer relationships through personalized, tailored problem-solving and genuine human connection at key moments of your customer’s journey.

Engage and retain your customers

<ul><li>Map out career paths. Having clearly defined career paths gives people something to work towards. </li><li>Rethink your metrics to properly reflect the work. While it’s great that support reps can really get their teeth into complex problems and pull apart issues, it also means that the problems they’re working on can take longer and be more difficult to solve. </li><li>Treat humans like humans. This means that if things feel overwhelming, your support reps have time to step away from the inbox and go for a walk, and they’re not constantly in thrall to their numbers. As a manager, you also need to be deliberate about making your team’s escalation paths clear. It’s important for them to know that they don’t have to sit there and deal with something that’s not going anywhere.</li></ul>

3 human strategies to support your support team

Support teams have a huge impact on customer satisfaction. Here's why human support is so crucial – and how to get the most out of your team.

How to Create a Knowledge Base: Building Self-Service for Customer Support | Groove Blog

Jeff Toister on a guaranteed customer experience

How to Build a Thriving Support Team and Department - Help Scout

A Customer Service Video Tutorial

How support leaders can empower their teams to satisfy, delight, and retain customers

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